Tnr's Complete Holiday Campaign Coverage

January 2, 2008

If you're just returning to TNR.com after taking a holiday
vacation, welcome back! You've missed an exciting week of wall-to-wall campaign
coverage. Jason Zengerle kicked
it off by reporting from John McCain's back-to-the-future resurgence in New
Hampshire (mirrored, to a lesser degree, in
Iowa), and followed it up with a look
at John Edwards's efforts to reach out to middle-class Granite State voters (a
subject Jonathan Cohn, also on the ground in
New Hampshire, tackled as well). Meanwhile, Cass
Sunstein and Sean
Wilentz continued their dialogue about the press's enthusiasm for Barack
Obama, Dana Goldstein weighed
in on Obama's efforts to reach out to women, Michael Currie Schaffer discussed
the real reason to be concerned about his past drug use, Martin Peretz blogged
about the racial significance of his campaign, and
drama critic Jeremy McCarter evaluated Obama's appearance on "Meet the Press": "Is he more like a
rookie next to tested veterans, or young Mozart in a crowd of Salieris?"
Most critically, some high-level Photoshop work revealed Obama's heretofore
undiagnosed resemblance
to Popeye (hit refresh if the photo doesn’t immediately load). On the Republican front, Jonathan Chait peered
into (sub. req’d) the seedy underbelly of
Rudy Giuliani's consulting firm and Alan Wolfe expounded
upon (sub. req’d) the culture of Mormon
prosperity surrounding Mitt Romney.

Our main focus, of course, was in Iowa, where Stumpers Michael
Crowley, Noam Scheiber, and Eve Fairbanks rang in the new year crisscrossing the state. Scheiber
dissected Obama's closing
argument and appeal
to non-traditional caucusgoers, as well as Mitt Romney's stump
speech and decision
to go negative. Crowley examined the "disaster"
that is Fred Thompson's final pre-caucus push, found
out that some Iowans seem to have bought into the notion that Barack Obama
is Muslim, and reported
that the Hillary campaign has finally figured out how to get Bill to stay on
message--which, Scheiber says, makes
him a pretty effective weapon. Fairbanks watched Michelle Obama impress
a roomful of seniors, mused on the Iowa GOP's obsession
with immigration, and took
a look inside the world of Ron Paul's adoring undergraduate supporters, the
Deaniacs of '08.

Events in the rest of the world, needless to say, didn't
come to a standstill just because the caucuses are imminent. The site had a
distinctly South Asian flavor this week, between Josh Kurlantzick's analysis
of the tragic assassination of Benazir Bhutto (whose impact on Iowa E.J. Dionne
Jr. examined),
Amartya Sen's lengthy essay
(sub. req’d) on the consequences of British
colonialism in India, and Samanth Subramanian's complaint
about awful journalism in India. On the Latin American beat, Alvaro Vargas
Llosa waxed
pessimistic about the prospects of Cristina Fern